Re-Wiring the brakes.
My 35' ~10,000 lb GVWR trailer brakes were wired with 14 gauge wire and very poor crimps. All the crimps on that I've seen so far are pretty bad... I'm going to redo it with a quality crimp tool ...
Forum Discussion
Peg Leg wrote:
When I had trouble with my old TT I just stripped back the wires and soldered all the connections. Still working great when I sold it after 18 yrs.
Yes, I had been in the solder camp. I'm going to give proper crimps a shot and see how that works. I can't believe that the trailer manufacturer is unable to meet the minimum requirements of the axle manufacturer for wire size....
RCMAN46 wrote:
If you are going to go to the trouble of running new wire I would run a separate wires to each side. 12 ga would be OK.
The reason I would do this it would be easy and the hard work done in case you would decide to use the Tuson sway control device in the future. Right now the device is not available to the general public. But if the device does as advertised and goes on the market it should be on all trailers.
Good point. I was going to home run all the wires to the front junction box (so 4 wires per side).
RCMAN46 wrote:
A good controller does not really care if there is some voltage drop. The controller should raise the voltage as necessary as required. This assumes the controller can be set at a gain setting less than maximum.
Yes, this is part of my problem. I **was** able to run with the gain setting at about 70 percent or so. On my most recent trip, I found I was turning the gain up throughout the day and at one point, with the gain all the way up I felt like I had WAY less brake power than what I expected. It's possible that this braking issue is intermittent. Based on the observations below, I thing a "redo" would be faster and produce better results.
I've already adjusted the brakes. I could hear the pads drag on the high spots on all the drums before adjusting. They didn't take much adjustment either, so that wasn't the issue.
The magnets all took 3 amps and I could not turn the wheels by hand when energized.
As I dug into the brake system I discovered
1) poor crimps
2) under sized wire
3) Wire strands cut to fit the crimp (main junction box joining 10,14 and breakaway (16 or smaller).
4) Bare wire exposed to the elements:
